


scars beneath the skin

by renecdote



Series: hc_bingo 2018 [6]
Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Crying, Flashbacks, Fluff, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Injury, Near Death Experiences, Platonic Cuddling, Sort Of, reference to canon character death, they're there but they're not explicitly flashbacks idk, worrying
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-08
Updated: 2018-11-08
Packaged: 2019-08-20 10:22:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,323
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16553978
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/renecdote/pseuds/renecdote
Summary: A broken arm and a concussion are a small price to pay for his brother not falling to his death. They don’t need to worry about him, he can handle the injuries. He can handle the flashbacks as well, the living nightmare that’s ready to rise up and swallow him at any moment. He has to be able to handle it.A grapple line snaps on patrol. The injuries are relatively minor but the incident dredges up memories and fears for Dick.





	scars beneath the skin

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AngryTrashBaby](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AngryTrashBaby/gifts).



> The lovely [bi-wing](http://bi-wing.tumbr.com) wanted Dick being vulnerable but trying to be strong in front of his brothers. I did my best to deliver.
> 
> This also fills the "near death experience" square on my hurt/comfort bingo card.

It could have been a lot worse. Dick keeps repeating that, clinging to the words so he doesn’t drown in how bad it was. His arm screams when he moves it, fractured bone scraping against fractured bone, but he pushes through it to get out of the Batmobile. It’s just pain. He should be grateful he can still feel pain instead of being-

No. It could have been a lot worse but _it wasn’t_.

Dick leans back against the Batmobile, feeling light-headed, legs weak, unable to hold his own weight. Alfred is by his side in seconds, pulling Dick’s good arm across his shoulder to help him to the medical bay. “Lets get you lying down,” he says, kind and firm all at once. The same voice he used to keep Dick home when he wanted to push through a cold to patrol when he was Robin. “Is it just your arm?”

Dick tries to turn, to look behind at the footsteps following them across the Cave. “Damian—”

“I am fine, Richard,” Damian says. He comes up on Alfred’s other side, says to the butler, “He also hit his head.”

He sounds huffy and Dick knows anyone else might think he was irritated but Dick knows he’s not. He’s shaken, worried. As soon as Dick is sitting on a gurney he reaches out for his brother, pulls him close enough to hug with one arm. It’s as much for his own benefit as Damian’s, he can admit to himself, but Damian doesn’t need to know that. He doesn’t need to know how rattled Dick is as well. 

It could have been a lot worse. The mantra isn’t helping as much as Dick hoped. Worse is just flashing before his eyes. Twisted limbs, caved in skulls, blood. So much blood. Concrete and sand blurring together, Robin’s colours in glittering lycra, Dick’s features staring out of older faces. He squeezes his eyes shut, tries to breathe around the pounding of his heart. That wasn’t what happened. Not this time. 

“Dick?”

Dick startles when Alfred’s hand touches his shoulder. Damian is pulling away from him and it takes all Dick’s resolve to let him go. Damian is fine, he’s alive, he’s not going to stop being alive if Dick isn’t holding him.

Dick tries to shake away the past, the terror that had gripped him when Robin’s grapple line snapped in front of him, the same terror he’d felt back then as well. Moving his head too much makes it throb and leaves him dizzy. It takes a few seconds before he can blink Alfred’s worried face back into focus. Damian hovers to the side, face blank but hands clenched tightly where they’re crossed over his chest. He watches silently while Alfred performs a quick neurological examination and asks Dick questions to check his memory and concentration.

“Just a minor concussion,” Alfred diagnoses, focus already shifting to Dick’s arm. “I don’t think this will need surgery but I’d like to take an x-ray to be sure. Lie back properly on that bed, Master Dick.”

He wheels the portable x-ray machine over and Dick lies very still while it takes a picture of his arm. He closes his eyes but snaps them open a second later. For a moment, he’d been back on the rooftop, lying on his back, winded and in pain after rolling to a stop. Damian hadn’t been in his arms anymore and for the disoriented few seconds it took to find him lying a few feet away, Dick had thought he’d missed, he hadn’t caught his brother, he’d slipped right out of Dick’s arms and was crumpled in the street. Panic flutters in his chest, clawing at his throat, prickling behind his eyes, and Dick takes a shuddering breath to reign it in.

“Richard?” Damian’s face leans into his vision. “Are you alright?”

“I’m fine, Dames,” Dick says, forcing his voice to be steady.

Alfred raises the head of the bed a bit then offers him painkillers and a cup of water. Dick’s stomach is twisting with pain and images of mangled bodies, the sudden stop at the end of a deadly fall, but he forces the pills down. It’s just one more step in proving he’s fine. One more step closer to _being_ fine.

Maybe Alfred sees something on his face because he says, “Master Damian, why don’t you have a shower? You can help me put a cast on when the pain dulls a bit.”

Damian sets his jaw, ready to argue that he doesn’t need to shower, he needs to stay by Dick’s side. 

“That’s a good idea,” Dick agrees before his brother’s protest can be formed. As much as he doesn’t want to let Damian out of his sight, he doesn’t want to break down in front of his brother either and he feels dangerously close to that happening.

Damian stares at him long and hard before huffing. “Fine.”

The roar of an engine fills the Cave before Red Robin’s motorcycle skids to a stop. Dick tries not to close his eyes and cry. He just wanted a few minutes to himself while Damian was in the shower. A few minutes to let the painkillers kick in, to get his head back on straight. A few minutes to not be okay. 

Tim pulls off his mask as he approaches, worried blue eyes zeroing in on Dick. “Oracle said there was an accident-”

“I’m fine,” Dick says. His smile feels stiff, flaking around the edges. “Just a broken arm.”

“And a concussion,” Damian adds, voice no louder than a grumble.

Dick tousles his hair. “But I’m fine,” he repeats. A broken arm and a concussion are a small price to pay for his brother not falling to his death. They don’t need to worry about him, he can handle the injuries. He can handle the flashbacks as well, the living nightmare that’s ready to rise up and swallow him at any moment. He has to be able to handle it.

Tim moves closer while Damian retreats to have a shower. “Do you want me to look at it?” he asks. For a moment, Dick thinks he’s talking about the broken arm. “I’ll check all the other cables too, make sure this won’t happen to anyone else.”

Oh. Realisation sounds like the snap of a specially-designed monofilament wire that should have been strong enough to hold an eleven-year-old boy. It replays over and over in Dick’s mind, superimposed with other costumes, other people he loves falling to Gotham’s merciless streets below. 

“Sure,” Dick says, hearing himself as if through a tunnel. “It’s in the car.”

Damian had had the foresight to hold onto the broken grapple while Dick tried not to freak out.

“Okay.” Tim pauses. “Are you sure you’re okay, Dick?”

Dick opens his eyes. He hadn’t realised he’d closed them. “Yeah,” he says. He smiles, hopes it doesn’t look as much like a grimace as it feels. “Just a bad headache. Concussion and all that.”

Tim doesn’t look like he believes that but he doesn’t push it. 

He sits on on a stool behind Dick and tinkers with the grappling gun while Damian helps Alfred put a cast on Dick’s arm. Dick is glad it’s out of sight. It’s just an object, Dick knows that, it’s stupid not to want to see it. But he can’t even think about it without seeing his little brother falling, he’s not sure how well he’d be able to handle actually looking at the device responsible right now. 

The fibreglass cast is blue and dries quickly while Dick sits there. He thinks about the doodles he’s going to get Damian to draw on it tomorrow to distract himself. 

“How does that feel?” Alfred asks.

Dick flexes his fingers. “Good,” he says. 

Alfred helps him put a sling on to keep the arm immobilised. “There we go,” he says. “Now off to bed, you need rest—all of you.”

They move slowly upstairs. Dick tries not to sag against the wall of the elevator. Just a bit further, he tells himself, barely twenty steps until his room, another five to get to the bed. Tim and Damian stay close the whole way. Dick is tempted, so tempted, to lean on them for help but he’s sure that if he leans even a little bit he’s going to collapse completely. 

“Are you comfortable?”

“Do you need anything?”

“I can get you another pillow.”

“Can you reach your pain meds here?”

Dick waves their fussing away. “I’m fine, guys, seriously.”

About this, it’s honest. He pats the bed beside him. “Who wants to cuddle?”

It’s not an unusual thing to ask, they won’t see it as a need to hold onto one or both of them and never let go. Damian clambers onto the bed beside him and lies down on his good side. Tim pulls the chair over from under the desk and sits on it cross-legged. He snaps a picture of Dick with his phone, shrugging and offering a simple “Babs” when Dick raises an eyebrow. 

Dick yawns, exhaustion and adrenaline crash catching up with him now that he’s comfortable. Maybe not relaxed, but getting there. 

“You should go to bed,” Dick tells Tim. “It’s late, and you never sleep enough.”

Tim is stubborn, but fifteen minutes later Dick manages to convince him to get some sleep in his own bed. He’s more reluctant to let go of Damian, and Damian seems equally reluctant to let go of him. Dick almost had to watch another loved one fall to their death, but Damian is the one who was falling. Dick’s arm tightens around his brother and Damian doesn’t complain. 

Damian falls asleep there, warm weight reassuring against Dick’s side. He can feel the rise and fall of his brother’s steady breathing. It eases a bit more of the panic in Dick’s chest. He wants to close his eyes and sleep as well but he’s afraid of what he’ll dream. Afraid he’ll wake his brother with screaming and thrashing. 

The bedside lamp is still on, the room filled with the light’s warm glow. It’s on the wrong side, Dick can’t quite reach it without dislodging Damian to reach across with his uninjured arm. He doesn’t mind. He’s not sure he would turn if off even if he could. It feels childish to use the light as a guardian against horrors, but he likes being able to see the room, to see his brother’s face slackened in sleep, to see that they’re both safe and alive in the Manor. The images flashing behind his eyes are bad enough without the dark to fuel them.

There’s no knock to signal Bruce’s arrival, just the door opening to let him slip inside. He pauses for a moment, looking over his sons cuddled together, then he circles the bed to sit in the chair pulled up on the other side. 

Dick smiles and it feels a little more real than earlier. “Hey,” he says quietly, “how was space?”

“Fine,” Bruce grunts. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. It’s just a broken arm, Bruce.”

“Hm.” 

Bruce’s eyes study Dick’s own, a thoughtful uptick at the corner of his mouth. Damian makes a snuffling sound and presses his face more firmly against Dick’s chest. Dick runs his fingers through his brother’s hair, gently so as not to wake him but enough to soothe away any restless dreams. Bruce is waiting when he looks back up.

“Alfred told me what happened,” he says, words quiet and deliberate, like a tiger stalking through the thick undergrowth of a jungle. “Are you okay, chum?”

Yes, Dick wants to say, I’m fine, Bruce, really. But emotion clogs up his throat before the words can slip out. The tears he’d held back earlier spring forward and he squeezes his eyes shut. They slip out anyway, trails of warmth dampening his cheeks, the taste of salt on his lips. Bruce moves closer, perching on the edge of the mattress so he can carefully shift Damian’s head and pull Dick into a hug.

“Sorry,” Dick chokes out. He doesn’t pull away though, doesn’t care that his broken arm is pushing into Bruce’s chest, he just curls his fingers into the back of his dad’s shirt and cries against his shoulder. Quiet, muffled sobs that he prays don’t wake Damian. 

Bruce cups the back of his head, the other hand rubbing up and down Dick’s spine. “Shh, it’s okay, don’t apologise,” he says and Dick feels the rumble of the words through his jaw. “Someone told me once that feeling emotions instead of repressing them is actually good for you.”

Dick snorts, the sound caught up in a sob. Then he cries harder because it could have been Alfred who said that, but it was also Dick, in a hundred fights about a hundred things that seem so stupid right now. He could have died tonight. Damian could have died. If that grapple line had snapped a few seconds earlier, if they’d been a few levels higher, if there hadn’t been a roof to tumble onto…

Bruce holds him until his tears peter out and then for a little longer, until Dick starts to pull away. Bruce wipes the last few tears away with his thumb and kisses the top of Dick’s temple before letting him go. 

“Get some rest, Dick,” he says, flicking off the lamp. He settles back in the chair, no intention of leaving even without Dick asking him to stay.

Dick feels a small arm snake across his waist when he leans back. It squeezes; a short, gentle pressure that he almost could have imagined. A wordless _we’re okay_. Dick feels too wrung out to care anymore about being strong in front of his little brother. He wraps his good arm around Damian’s shoulders and squeezes back. They’re okay. It could have been a lot worse.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading :) Comments and kudos are always appreciated if you enjoyed the fic. You can also find me on tumblr [here](http://tantalum-cobalt.tumblr.com%22).


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